Burdened to Pray

By Cheri Bunch
Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, grew up in a strong Christian home. As a child he was very determined to be a missionary and take the gospel into China, but he began to stray from the faith in his teen years. I would like to share a bit of his testimony taken from a book entitled Hudson Taylor and Maria: A Match Made in Heaven by John Pollock (Christian Focus, 1996). I love the way the Lord used Hudson’s mother illustrated in the excerpt below:

“A year later, in June 1849, his mother was away. One warm afternoon Amelia [his sister] was out and Hudson had nothing to do on a half-holiday. He looked idly over his father’s books and rummaged in a basket of popular ‘Gospel tracts.’ He picked one out, intending to read the story and skip the moral. He went into the barn behind the house and shop, curled up comfortably and began ‘in utterly unconcerned state of mind, with a distinct intention to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy.’

As he read, one sentence gripped him. Suddenly he realized that he approached religion from the wrong angle. He believed Christianity to be a dreary struggle to pay off bad deeds by good. He had long abandoned this struggle. He owed too much. He had gone into spiritual bankruptcy, paying a small dividend to his Divine Creditor in the shape of chapel attendance and of prayers rattled off at night, but with no hope of discharge; like most bankrupts he had sought to have a good time.

One sentence in the tract broke open his mind to a sudden certainty that Christ by His death upon the cross had already discharged this debt of sins. ‘And with this dawned the joyful conviction, as light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees and accepting this Savior and His Salvation, to praise Him forevermore.’

No Luther, Bunyan or Wesley had a more complete sense of the rolling away of his burden, of light dismissing darkness, of rebirth and the close friendship of Christ, than Hudson Taylor on that June afternoon of 1849 at the age of seventeen.

Several days passed before he shyly told Amelia under seal of secrecy. At the return of his mother ten days afterwards he ran to the door ‘to tell her I had such glad news to give’. She replied as she hugged him, ‘I know, my boy. I have been rejoicing for a fortnight in the glad tidings you have to tell me.’ Hudson was amazed. Had Amelia blabbed? His mother denied it. She said that eighty miles away, on the very day of the incident in the barn, she had felt such an overwhelming desire to pray for Hudson that she spent hours on her knees, and had arisen with the unshakeable conviction that her prayers were answered. ‘It was perhaps natural,’ Hudson wrote years later, ‘that from the commencement of my Christian life I was led to feel that prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God.’ ”

What a testimony! I hope it encourages you as it has me!